Using Stuff Up: One

Using stuff up is one of my preferred ways of cooking. Especially if I'm a guest and cooking at somebody's house. I never feel bad about using ingredients if they 'need to be used up'. Same reason I like skipping. And it means I don't have to make big decisions about what to buy and deal with that horrible ordeal. So, this is one of those and I don't have a name for it.

The base for this was the end of my rocket pesto pasta. It was quite oily but there was a lot of flavour there. So I wanted to expand on it and make it something different. I threw in a lot of things that were around me and I'll try to recount them, mostly.

I chopped up the leftover, oily spaghetti pasta and heated up the pot. There was some really stale bread that needed using up, so I broke it up and stirred it around in the oily mixture, adding some tahini and some old juice that may not have been so nice to drink but worked to offset the bitter-but-creamy tahini and softened the bread. I threw in some tomato puree, some chopped carrots, possibly some vinegar and maybe nutritional yeast. I'm not sure. It's a bit of a blur. But I enjoyed it more that the original pasta. Don't follow this as a recipe. Just use stuff up.

It's fun to use stuff up.

- Dara

Skipped Rocket Pesto

I'm in Vienna at the moment. With a friend, I found two packets of organic rocket (or ruccola in German) in a skip near an eco shop. The ruccola was on the way out, so I decided to make rocket pesto, so it would last a few days longer.

 I washed then sliced up the ruccola finely and add lots of diced garlic, oils (olive, peanut, and pumpkin seed), lemon juice, salt, pepper, and a few finely diced capers for extra flavour. I left it overnight to let the flavours get to know each other. Then, when the time came to feast (it is always time to feast), I just stirred it in to some nice brown organic (or bio as they say here) pasta.

I used 500g of pasta and it was still rather oily. I'd recommend bread for soakage. Afterwards I turned the remainder of oily the mixture into another meal, which you can see in the next post. Hope to see you there. Goodbye for now.

- Dara

Salad Soup

In winter, most people would rather something warm than a salad, but feel compelled to buy leaves for health reasons. This is what was behind my friend giving me half a bag of wilting salad, and why I decided to try to make something a bit more comforting out of it.

I boiled an onion, a chopped potato and a few cloves of crushed garlic with some bouillon until the potatoes were starting to disintegrate, then I added the spinach, rocket, watercress and red chard. After taking it off the heat I added a handful of frozen peas, which after a few minutes cooled the soup down enough to blend it.

A dollop of soya yogurt (the remains of the sojade from the reviewing session) and some freshly ground black pepper made this a delicious and nutritious soup.